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America keeps choosing poverty — but it doesn’t have to

vox.com

Welcome to the first issue of Within Our Means, a biweekly newsletter about ending poverty in America. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox, please sign up here: I’ve always been interested in how race and class shape our society and my work often focuses on topics like criminal justice, housing, and the social safety net. But while I like to point out problems, I also think that’s only half of my job. The other half is to ask, “Now what?” That’s what this newsletter will do. Some issues will dig into the specific ways that poverty punishes people across the country. Others will look at policies that either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. The overarching goal is to find tangible solutions to improve people’s lives. And so if you, like me, think that poverty is a problem that can be eradicated in the United States, then think of this newsletter as a way for us to envision what a realistic path toward that future could look like. Why so many Americans are poor America has gone through many ups and downs since the civil rights era, but one thing has remained remarkably constant: In 1970, 12.6 percent of Americans were considered poor; in 2023, that number was 11.1 percent — or 36.8 million people. “To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote last year. It might seem as though the persistence of poverty in the United States says something about how intractable the problem is. This is, after all, the richest country in the world. If America can’t rid itself of poverty, then who can? But it’s not that America can’t do it; it’s that it chooses not to. That said, there isn’t a single answer to why so many Americans continue to be stuck in poverty. It is true, for example, that the American welfare system is broken, consistently undermined, and, in some cases, set up to fail. Studies have shown that programs like work requirements don’t work, and states have been caught hoarding billions of dollars worth of welfare funds instead of distributing them among the people they’re intended for. But it’s also true that an extraordinary amount of money and effort go into establishing and administering antipoverty programs, and many of them do succeed. Social Security, for example, keeps more than 20 million people above the poverty line. In recent years, America showed just how much of a choice poverty is: The short-lived pandemic-era child tax credit expansion cut child poverty by more than a third. And the bolstered social safety net from Covid relief bills nearly halved child poverty in a single year — the sharpest drop on record. Once those programs expired, however, the child poverty rate bounced right back. One reason poverty is so stubborn Last year, many homeowners in Lexington, Massachusetts came out to oppose zoning changes that would allow for more housing to be built in the wealthy Boston suburb. The people who needed the new housing were, understandably, not impressed. “How do you think it makes me feel when some people from a point of great privilege say that they don’t want the type of multifamily housing that I live in because it may look ugly or doesn’t fit the essence of this town?” one young resident, whose family relied on multifamily housing to be able to live in Lexington, told the town legislature. “Are we really setting the bar of entry to be a $1 million dollar house to join our community?” This situation is one answer to the question of what makes the problem of poverty so complicated: competing interests. The reality is that too many people benefit from the existence of poverty. The economy already pits too many groups against each other, leaving many Americans afraid that they have too much to lose should we choose to build a more equitable society. Homeowners are told that their homes are the key to building wealth, so they reasonably want their property values to keep rising. For renters, on the other hand, any increase in housing costs is a loss. So while renters might want lawmakers to make room for more housing, homeowners often resist any change that could make their home prices stagnate.This is one theme we’ll be exploring in Within Our Means — who stands to benefit and who stands to lose from the policies our lawmakers choose to pursue. We’ll also be looking at questions about fairness, political viability, and why antipoverty programs ought to be viewed as investments rather than handouts. And though we’ll often look at economic arguments, we also won’t shy away from arriving at morally driven conclusions. Sometimes, a program that helps the most vulnerable people is still worth paying for even if it doesn’t necessarily help the economy grow. It doesn’t have to be this way Even when divergent interests exist — like those between renters and homeowners — change is possible: Lexington ended up approving the necessary zoning changes to build more housing, and neighboring towns followed its lead. This was not, by any means, an inevitable or easy outcome. For many decades, Lexington and its neighbors had been symbols of liberal hypocrisy — the kinds of places where you might see “Black Lives Matter” and “refugees are welcome” signs, but vehement opposition to any new housing project that would help desegregate the region. But one lesson out of Lexington is that sometimes people need a push. It wasn’t just that the town residents had a sudden change of heart — though some residents had clearly been troubled by their own history. The state had enacted a law requiring jurisdictions served by public transit to authorize building more multifamily housing if they wanted to receive certain state funding. Whether the town ends up building the housing units that would make the suburb more affordable depends on whether residents put their money where their mouth is. But at least now, the door has been opened. Some of the changes needed to eradicate poverty are small, unsexy bureaucratic adjustments, like local zoning reforms in Lexington and elsewhere. Others require an ambitious rethinking. The project of ending poverty will be costly, but it’s long been clear that America can afford it. If more than two-thirds of household wealth is concentrated among the top 10 percent while the bottom half of households own a mere 2.5 percent, then nobody should be living in squalor. “Now there is nothing new about poverty,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said nearly 60 years ago. “What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will.” Share your thoughts If you have any ideas, thoughts, or a personal experience with antipoverty programs that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at abdallah.fayyad@vox.com. This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.

The climate crisis is here. We can still have a better world.

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vox.com

If I asked you to tell me the one issue that makes you feel the most pessimistic, what would it be? I feel pretty confident saying that the most popular response — certainly one of the most popular responses, anyway — would be climate change. But is climate despair really as tempting and reasonable as it seems? The problem isn’t imaginary. Climate change is real and terrifying, but even if it’s as bad as the worst predictions suggest, do we gain anything by resigning ourselves to that fate? What effect might our despair have on our ability to act in the present? Is our fatalism undercutting our capacity to tackle this problem? On a recent episode of The Gray Area, I invited Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on to talk about how we might collectively address climate change without falling into despair or getting mired in false hope. She’s a marine biologist, a co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and the author of a new book called What If We Get it Right? It’s a curated series of essays and poetry and conversations with a wide range of people who are all, in their own ways, trying to build a better future. And this is not a blindly optimistic book: The point isn’t that everything is fine. The point is that we have to act as though the future is a place we actually want to live in — not centuries into the distant future but now and in the decades to come. According to Johnson, there are already many concrete climate solutions. If we were motivated by a belief in a better tomorrow — not a worse one — we would implement more of those solutions (and find new ones). So, if you’re someone looking for inspiration, or reasons to feel hopeful — or, even better, for guidance on what to do and where to start — then this book, and this conversation with Johnson, is for you. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing You’re a marine biologist, which I think is a standard top-five dream job for kids. Was that your gateway to environmentalism? Is that why you do this work? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Super common dream job — like many 5- to 10-year-olds are very into marine biology as a life path. But I was really just a kid who loved nature, which is honestly not very unique. How many kids like bugs and fireflies and shooting stars and octopuses and autumn leaves and all the rest of it? I was just like, “This all seems very cool.” That innate curiosity — that biophilia, as E.O. Wilson calls it, the magnificent entomologist — is just part of who we are as humans. It’s normal to love the world. It’s less common to make that your job. But of course, once you fall in love with nature — whether it’s with one ecosystem or a few specific species — and you find out that it’s threatened, you’re like, “Wait a second, what are we doing about this? Is there a grown-up who’s already on top of this? Is this not sorted? Seems like we should protect forests and coral reefs and all the rest.” My mom was cleaning out the closet and found these old school papers, and apparently I was writing the same essays since I was like 10 about nature being great and how we should protect it. So, it wasn’t always going to be the ocean. I wanted to become a park ranger at one point, an environmental lawyer at another. But the ocean seemed like it needed more advocates at the particular moment that I was thinking about graduate school. Sean Illing You open your book by saying that any time you tell people that you do climate work, they invariably ask, and I’m quoting you — “how fucked are we?” Well, Ayana, how fucked are we? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson We’re pretty fucked, but there’s a lot we could do to have a better possible future. And I think it’s important to always hold both of those things together. We have already changed the climate. We are already seeing the intense heat waves and floods and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes. All of that is already supercharged by our changed climate. But there’s still so much we can do. We basically have the solutions we need. We’re just being really slow at deploying them, at implementing them. We already know how to transition to renewable energy and stop spewing fossil fuels. We know how to protect and restore ecosystems that are absorbing all this carbon. We know how to green buildings, insulate buildings, shift to better public transit, improve our food system — the solutions are all right there. My book has a reality check chapter where I lay out all the bad news, but that’s three pages. And then the rest of the book asks, what are we going to do about it? Sean Illing There’s no point anymore in talking about how to solve the problem of climate change, right? I mean, that ship has sailed. It’s all about adaptation now. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Yeah. I mean, the climate has already changed. There’s not a time machine back to before we put a completely mind-boggling amount of excess carbon into the atmosphere. Whether and how well we address the climate crisis determines the outcomes of life on Earth for all 8 million species and whether hundreds of millions of people live or die, and how well we all can live. So even though perfection is not an option, there’s such a wide range of possible futures, and we just need to make sure we get the best possible one. Sean Illing This is really about degrees of suffering and the consequences of specific choices we make — or won’t make, as it might be. The difference between temperature spikes of 2 and 4 degrees is the difference between lots of people living and dying. Right? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson It’s easier for me to think about it in terms of the human body running a fever: the difference between you having a fever of 100 and 102 or 103 is a huge difference. And that’s the level of sensitivity to temperature that all species and ecosystems have. If we can prevent a half a degree of warming or a degree of warming, that actually makes a big difference. It’s worth the effort. Sean Illing People like to use different words to describe the project ahead of us — words like “sustainability” or “revolution.” You like to use the word “transformation.” Why is that a better way to frame this? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson The two words that I pair together are “possibility” and “transformation.” There’s this wide spectrum of possible futures. I’m not an optimist. I’m not particularly hopeful given human history because we don’t have a great track record of addressing collectively major challenges that we face. There are some important exceptions to that, but the sense of possibility really drives me because the future is not yet written. Like, what if we just wrote a better one than the trajectory that we’re on? Sean Illing How do we reshape and reimagine how we live on this planet and with each other? I can get excited about possibility and transformation — like, what kind of future do we want to create together? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Okay, you can’t see me right now but I’m wiggling — I’m wiggling my fingers, gesturing with like, possibility, excitement, sparkles. I just feel like we need to be asking more big questions of ourselves and each other in this moment. We’re at this inflection point in human history. We either get our shit together or we don’t. And obviously I would like us to at least try. Sean Illing But you don’t like the word “sustainable,” right? You feel like that’s setting the bar too low? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson It’s sort of just an everywhere word. It is useful — but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning. It’s very general. A useful analog I’ve heard is: If someone asked you how your marriage was going and you were like, “Eh, it’s sustainable,” I would probably say, “Well, okay, don’t want to trade lives with you.” So, yes, I would say we should set a higher bar than sustainability, especially given that we’ve already degraded nature so much that I don’t want to just sustain what we have. I want to protect and restore. Sean Illing A beautiful question you pose in your book is: What if climate adaptation is beautiful? So, let’s talk about that. What if climate adaptation is beautiful? What then? Is it rainbows and sunshine? What are the kind of things we have to look forward to? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Well, I think we will always have rainbows and sunshine. That’s the good news. But imagine if we were just deliberate about building things that were aesthetically pleasing and durable and could be deconstructed and repurposed instead of demolishing things. Some cities and towns are now passing essentially deconstruction ordinances that say you have to take apart buildings instead of demolishing them, instead of just pulverizing everything and sending it to the landfill. You have to take it apart so the pieces can be reused like Legos, which seems obvious, almost like, “Why wouldn’t we always have been doing that?” There are so many choices that we’re currently making that shape our societal trajectory. Every day, we are building a piece of the future, something that will be here in 10 years or a century or more. So let’s just be really thoughtful about all that and make it nice. Sean Illing Are you encouraged by the direction of the climate movement as it stands at the moment? What are your major concerns? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson My primary concern is that we’re just not moving fast enough, given that we have basically all the solutions that we need to begin to make a difference. It’s just incredibly frustrating how politics are holding us back. I mean, in this country, there’s division between the two major parties about whether climate change exists and whether it’s something we should address, which is just so retrograde, I don’t even know where to start. And it’s especially frustrating because most Republican politicians are literally just pretending they don’t think it exists; they are fully aware that climate science is real, but it’s untenable politically for them to admit that. That’s a huge part of why we’re in this mess, as well as the fact that the fossil fuel lobby is ridiculously powerful in this country. And, you know, so many politicians are bought and paid for in one way or another, even though the fossil fuel industry doesn’t account for very many jobs. Then you have the banking sector, which is funding all these fossil fuel corporations to continue expanding their extraction and infrastructure. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, 60 banks have provided 6.9 trillion in financing to fossil fuel companies. But the top four US banks alone, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, have provided almost $1.5 trillion to finance fossil fuel companies. So, yeah, if you have your money in any of those banks, I would encourage you to do something like move your retirement savings to a place that does not make the problem worse. Sean Illing What would be the difference between a Harris administration and another Trump administration? What are the stakes on the climate front? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson The stakes are sky high. There are actually graphs projecting the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between the two. It’s really remarkable because on one hand, you have Vice President Harris, who was the deciding vote in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest ever investment in climate solutions in world history. This Biden-Harris administration has created the American Climate Corps that has put tens of thousands of young people to work implementing climate solutions from reducing wildfire risk to installing solar panels to replanting wetlands. We have a loan program office in the Department of Energy that has hundreds of billions of dollars that they’re giving out to businesses that are figuring out this renewable energy transition. All of that could be completely wiped out, essentially on day one of a Trump administration. And so on the other hand, you have in Trump a candidate who has offered to fossil fuel executives that if they donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign, he will basically do their bidding once he gets into the White House. That is how stark a difference this is. Sean Illing There’s part of the book where you write — I’m quoting again— “Fuck hope. What’s the strategy?” Do you feel like we, meaning all of us collectively, have a clear, concrete strategy for creating a better future in the face of climate change? Or are we going to keep doing what we’ve been doing? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson This is where I think media, Hollywood, music, art, culture makers broadly matter so much. I cannot literally show you what the future could look like. I can talk about it. I can write about it. I can interview people about it. I can, as I did for this book, commission art about it. But if it’s possible to go through our day-to-day and not encounter anything about climate, that’s a huge problem. Right now, climate coverage accounts for less than 1 percent of the minutes on major TV news stations; that’s actually gone down from recent years, so we’re going in the wrong direction. If this is not part of our day-to-day exposure, then it’s just always on the back burner. There’s always something more important. And we’re thinking about climate as something separate from our other concerns, whereas it’s actually just the context within which everything else right now is playing out. So there’s a chapter in the book called “I Dream of Climate RomComs,” where I interview producer Franklin Leonard, founder of The Blacklist out in Hollywood, and Adam McKay, filmmaker, writer, director, about the role of Hollywood in this. Because basically, to date, Hollywood has just shown us the apocalypse, the fire and brimstone, The Day After Tomorrow kind of stuff. And there are very few examples of not like utopian rose-colored glasses stuff, but like literally, what if we just used the solutions we had and projected that forward? What would that look like? To hear the rest of Illing’s conversation with Johnson, listen to our latest episode on The Gray Area, available wherever you get your podcasts.

MTV’s nostalgia problem, explained by The Challenge

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vox.com

The cast of MTV’s The Challenge: Battle of The Eras. You’d be forgiven for thinking this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) was a rebroadcast of a previous ceremony. From performances by Lenny Kravitz and Public Enemy to the archival red-carpet looks worn by many attendees and host Megan Thee Stallion, the show’s homages were as central to the celebration as the current artists who were nominated. The overall throwback vibe was supposedly in service of the awards show’s 40th anniversary. However, the ceremony didn’t look that different from last year’s VMAs, which featured a tribute to the now-disgraced Diddy or other recent ceremonies honoring Busta Rhymes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and LL Cool J. This seems to be MTV’s playbook: force-feeding older viewers ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s nostalgia, especially now while they struggle to reel in the young people in the age of streaming and TikTok. For a brand that once represented the freshness of youth culture, it seems to be frozen in time. The cable network is at an interesting crossroads: Should it try to court an elusive Gen Z audience, or should it keep chasing the last generation that watched them? Since 2019, the network has been banking on reunion-style shows and all-star editions of iconic series like Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, Catfish, and, most recently, the former VH1 show The Surreal Life. If you’re younger than 30, there’s not much on their current schedule that would immediately draw you in, particularly when streamers — like Netflix and even Peacock — are making buzzier content for teenagers and young adults, with popular reality shows like Love Is Blind, Love Island USA, and The Traitors. The ultimate case study in MTV’s uncertain future is its Road Rules spinoff The Challenge. Now the longest-running show on the network, having started 26 years ago, the Road Rules competition series has successfully carried the legacy of MTV throughout structural changes and mergers, recently expanding with an All-Stars edition on Paramount+ and The Challenge: USA on CBS, and some international versions. However, the present iteration of The Challenge hasn’t exactly maintained the spirit of MTV. Currently, the show is attempting to conjure memories of its golden age with Battle of the Eras, the 40th season of the show, but the program falls flat without the unvarnished edge of the past. What was once a compelling clash of personalities and amateur athletes is now just a generic sports competition. To watch The Challenge from its early days to where it is now is to see how MTV has lost its way as a brand. The series might seem like an invincible force in television, but it’s only as fun as the infrastructure around it. But what’s the value of MTV nostalgia without all the weirdness and unpredictability? The Challenge represented the rowdy ethos of MTV. Now it’s something a lot safer. The Challenge has undergone several transformations since it premiered in 1998. The show ultimately became a competition between cast members of MTV’s Road Rules, where a group of attractive strangers live in a traveling RV, and Real World, where exactly seven attractive strangers share a house. (In later seasons, they added cast members of the dating show Are You The One?). Typically set in an exotic location, contestants live in what is essentially a frat house while they compete in a series of physical and mental games. These assignments range from outrageous stunts — like transferring food to a fake chicken’s mouth while dressed in a chicken suit — to brutal elimination challenges, like the Hall Brawl where players wrestle each other to reach the end of a narrow passage. Over time, the production’s budget has increased, and the show has become more physically demanding and stunt-y as a result. Die-hard fans refer to it as “America’s fifth sport,” and some competitors even undergo intense training to prepare. However, the boozy fights, romantic drama, and rivalries that span the seasons have always been as important as the actual gameplay, so much so that the premise of several previous seasons (Battle of the Exes, Rivals, etc.) rests upon personal beef and alliances. The Challenge maintains and extends these years-long storylines by reusing many of its most notorious and messiest competitors, like Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, Chris “CT” Tamburello, Laurel Stucky, Cara Maria Sorbello, and Aneesa Ferreira. While the fighting and debauchery adds an exciting layer to an already impressive athletic showcase, these moments of chaos have often been truly ugly, coming at the expense of women, people of color, and queer people. Particularly in earlier seasons, there’s an uncomfortable amount of misogynistic language, hostility, and condescension toward female players. Black contestants have been met with similar microaggressions, if not blatant racism. Producers tried to rectify this in 2020 when they hastily suspended contestant Dee Nguyen for making an inappropriate joke on Twitter about the Black Lives Matter movement. They also made the controversial choice to edit her out of the rest of the season. This foreshadowed a more censored approach to the program, one that would completely change the feel of The Challenge. Efforts by the network to remedy a culture of poor behavior on The Challenge was well-meaning but ultimately over-corrective. For example, night-out scenes, where a fight might break out or cast members might hook up, are now used as opportunities for competitors to discuss game strategy. On podcasts dedicated to the show, cast members constantly complain about messier drama being left out of the show. “You see a sort of progress happening in terms of the show not being as problematic as it was before,” says Challenge fan Kelli Williams, who co-hosts the podcast Beyond the Blinds. “But then there’s also the [newer] problem that it takes away from the drama of the show.” In response to BLM and changing ethical standards in reality TV, The Challenge has struggled to evolve while focusing on the aspects of the show that made it fun. In newer seasons, including the current Battle of the Eras season, the tone of the show has become almost comically serious and inspirational, as though the contestants are competing in the Olympics or for some greater cause beyond winning money and being on TV. Even the show’s dry, no-nonsense host, T.J. Lavin, has a gentler manner. It hardly feels like it’s from the same network that discovered Snooki and Spencer Pratt. “You think of someone like Leroy,” says Williams, of fan-favorite Leroy Garrett, a Real World alum who first competed on The Challenge: Rivals. “When he came on the show, he was a sanitation worker, and you’re watching him jump over cars over water. You’re like, ‘Wow, he’s not trained to do this.’ Whereas now people have to prepare for The Challenge, and they call it the ‘fifth sport.’ Be real right now. This is The Challenge.” Battle of the Eras catering to Gen X and millennial fans is exciting in theory. But the neutered flagship show can’t resuscitate the original DNA of MTV. Where does MTV go from here? MTV was always going to have a difficult time sustaining itself as a cultural tastemaker, especially as a cable station in an online world. But the network has a history of reinventing itself to meet the moment. The channel, founded in 1981, was initially targeted toward white, male rock fans until it was forced by public pressure to feature music videos by Black R&B and rap artists, debuting the program Yo! MTV Raps in 1988. When MTV’s first generation of viewers started outgrowing the channel in the early ’90s, it pioneered reality programming, starting with Real World and, later, shows like The Osbournes, The Hills, and Jersey Shore. As Amanda Ann Klein writes in her book Millennials Killed the Video Star, MTV executives have always had to work hard to maintain MTV’s key demographic. “The youth audience is fickle because the moment a company figures out how to create content that pleases them, they age out of that content,” she writes. Reality shows sustained the network for nearly two decades, in addition to music-focused hits like Total Request Live (TRL) and MTV Unplugged. The early 2010s saw the final season of Jersey Shore, the surprise scripted hits like Awkward and Teen Wolf, and the last truly memorable VMAs thanks to Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke – before a few years entering the proverbial programming desert, running episodes of the clip show Ridiculousness almost 24/7. By 2019, it seemed as though MTV had found a solution by upcycling successful IP. The reunion show Jersey Shore: Family Vacation garnered big ratings and was followed by a Teen Mom reunion series and a not-as-successful reboot of The Hills. On Paramount+, MTV launched The Challenge: All Stars and Real World: Homecoming. Much of MTV’s library of ’90s and early-aughts content also became available to stream on Paramount+. In the book Television’s Streaming Wars, Florida State University professor Leigh H. Edwards writes about how MTV’s nostalgic marketing strategy cleverly (if not temporarily) reignited interest in the brand. “In effect, MTV turns existing IP into new content on streaming that targets the older streaming audience and encouraging those viewers to rewatch older content,” she tells Vox. “These series generate nostalgia by including flashback footage that encourages audiences to go watch the original episodes.” This nostalgia approach, though, is more like a life jacket than a sustainable business plan. Real World: Homecoming is no longer available to stream and was seemingly canceled. The Challenge: All Stars has become less and less distinguishable from the original series as the casts overlap. Despite all the relative star power of Battle of the Eras, the landmark season still represents a ratings decline since the highly watched 35th season, Total Madness. Last year, Variety reported that MTV was the 44th most-watched television network in 2023, an 11 percent drop in total viewers from the previous year. If there’s any hope for an MTV revival, it’s that the viewership for this year’s VMAs increased by 8 percent compared to last year’s show. One has to think this has more to do with appearances by big, next-gen artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan — as well as ratings magnet Taylor Swift — than the show’s tributes to its peak era. At a time when networks are constantly renamed, rebranded, or completely scrapped, losing MTV wouldn’t be surprising, but it would be a huge cultural blow. Unfortunately, a network can only rely on nostalgia for so long before it looks like a graveyard.

Don’t use Venmo as your checking account

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vox.com

Venmo is good for sending money to friends, but it’s not necessarily the safest place to do your banking. | Vivien Killilea/Getty Images Some people collect coins or stamps. For a time, I collected debit cards. Not stolen ones! Each one of them had my name on them, right below the logo of the latest banking app I’d decided to try out: Venmo, Cash App, Chime, Varo, Current, Acorns. For the better part of a decade, I did all my banking through these apps, enjoying their slick user experience and lack of fees. The problem with every one of them, however, is that they’re not chartered banks. If the company behind the app went bankrupt, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would not necessarily come to my rescue. This disaster scenario was a hypothetical worry when I eventually settled for Chase and its FDIC insurance. For millions of others, it became a reality earlier this year when a company called Synapse collapsed and froze them out of their accounts. Users of Yotta, a popular savings app with a built-in lottery, and other apps that relied on Synapse to help manage their accounts couldn’t access their money for months. Now, as hundreds of thousands of Synapse customers’ dollars remain in limbo, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are calling for banking reforms, and the FDIC is proposing changes to its rules. Still, a growing number of people are embracing these financial technology, or fintech, services. More than a third of Gen Z and millennials used a fintech app or a digital bank as their primary checking account, according to a 2023 Cornerstone Advisors study. So some questions are worth asking: Is it a bad idea to use an app like Venmo as your main bank? Are digital banks like Chime trustworthy enough? The answer to both questions is yes. Venmo is not a bank, and using it as your primary checking account comes with some risks. Some fintech companies, like Chime, are just as big as traditional banks and offer some nice perks. Again, because they’re nontraditional, there are risks. “You’re not going to go back to a world where everybody works with a small bank and walks into a branch,” Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, one of the first digital banks. “The future is just going to be more fintech, and I think we all just need to get better at it.” To get better at all of this, it helps to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Neobanks and money transmitters, briefly explained The term fintech can refer to a lot of things, but when you’re talking about everyday services for everyday people, it typically refers to either neobanks or money transmitters. Chime is a neobank. Venmo is a money transmitter. They’re regulated in different ways, but because most of these companies issue debit cards, many people treat them like checking accounts. Fintech apps are not the same thing as FDIC-insured banks. Neobanks are fintech companies that offer services like checking accounts in partnership with chartered banks, which are FDIC-insured. Neobanks sometimes enlist intermediaries known as banking-as-a-service, or BaaS, companies, which are not FDIC-insured. Still, you will often see the FDIC logo on neobank websites, just like you see it stuck to the glass doors of many brick-and-mortar banks. That logo instills trust, and thanks to their partnerships, neobanks can claim some FDIC protections. But because they do not have bank charters, these neobanks and BaaS companies are not directly FDIC-insured. Instead, neobank customers can be eligible for something called pass-through deposit insurance coverage. Three things to know Listen to Vox’s Adam Clark Estes break down the potential pitfalls of keeping your money in a fintech app, like Venmo or Chime. @vox Venmo or Chime aren’t as safe as you think they are. Here’s what to know. ♬ original sound – Vox – Vox Pass-through insurance is a simple concept that’s deceivingly complex in practice. Essentially, if you deposit money into an account with a neobank, like Chime, the funds get routed to a chartered bank, sometimes through one of those BaaS intermediaries. If the chartered bank fails, no problem: FDIC insurance kicks in, and you can recoup up to $250,000 of your deposits. If the intermediary fails or the neobank itself fails, you might be eligible for pass-through insurance — but you might not. In its explainer about when or if you’ll get your money back in these kinds of situations, the FDIC literally says, “It depends.” “American consumers see the FDIC logo, and they interpret that as meaning: My money is safe and I will get it back,” said Jason Mikula, who runs the popular Fintech Business Weekly newsletter. “That’s just not what FDIC does exactly.” Money transmitters, also known as money services businesses, are even further removed from the perceived safety of the FDIC. Put bluntly, if you’re keeping all your money in a Venmo or Cash App account, you don’t qualify for FDIC insurance. Money transmitters are not neobanks or banks at all but rather completely different legal entities that are regulated by individual states as well as the Department of the Treasury. There are certain protections provided by these agencies, but FDIC insurance is not one of them. So when an app like Yotta or Chime says on its website that it’s FDIC insured, it’s not a lie, but it’s not necessarily true either. Venmo, to its credit, admits in the fine print of its homepage that its parent company PayPal “is not a bank” and “is not FDIC insured.” To confuse you even more, however, certain PayPal services that enlist a chartered bank partner, like a PayPal Mastercard or savings account, might qualify for FDIC insurance. Again, it depends. The perils and perks of banking with an app Fintech companies take careful steps to make banking with them feel safe. They include the FDIC logo on the website to provide customers with some peace of mind, even though the fine print on those protections is more complicated. They issue debit cards with the Visa or Mastercard logo to suggest that these cards play by the same rules as any big bank’s debit card. These logos can act as a stamp of approval, an assurance that your money is in good hands. This is actually the heart of the problem, as far as Sen. Elizabeth Warren is concerned. This month, she and Sen. Van Hollen asked regulators to ban neobanks and fintech companies from using the FDIC name and logo if they were only offering pass-through insurance. They also called for greater supervision of these companies under the Bank Service Company Act. “The average consumer shouldn’t be expected to understand the intricacies of FDIC insurance in order to comfortably and safely save or invest their money,” Warren’s letter says. “Consumers must feel confident that they are dealing with a regulated and insured entity when they see the FDIC logo.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that all neobanks and fintech companies are untrustworthy. In some cases, the sheer size and track record of fintech companies can instill quite a bit of trust. Chime, the largest digital bank with roughly 22 million customers, scored a $25 billion valuation in its latest round of funding and is planning to go public next year. Venmo’s parent company, PayPal, is widely considered safe and trustworthy. And don’t expect Block, the $42 billion company that owns Cash App as well as its own chartered bank, to fail any time soon. The truth is, even if there is some false sense of security, fintech apps offer certain customers features that big banks can’t or won’t. One thing that’s made Chime and many other neobanks so popular, for instance, is that they don’t charge so many fees. That’s a huge boon to young people as well as people without bank accounts. If a fintech app is your only option, then you might not care so much about FDIC insurance. “If you’re poor in America and you’re banking at Chase or Wells Fargo, you’re going to get overdraft fees, minimum balance fees,” Mikula explained. “So there is a real need that [fintech] companies fulfill as a result of your establishment banks essentially not wanting to bank poor people because it’s difficult to do profitably.” As many as 6 percent of Americans were living without a bank account in 2023, according to Federal Reserve data. That share grows to 23 percent for those making less than $23,000 a year. The unbanked population, which disproportionately comprises Black, Hispanic, and undocumented people, is at a greater risk of falling victim to predatory lending practices, including payday loans. Some fintech companies also offer short-term loans, though they’ve been criticized for being predatory as well. Fraud alert Payment apps like Venmo are popular with scammers. Using a Venmo-branded debit card comes with some purchase protection. If you happen to fall for a scam, however, there’s a good chance the app will not pay you back. Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle are all clear about issuing refunds for payments to other individuals: They don’t do it. Or at least they can’t guarantee it. You should treat these peer-to-peer payments like cash. Here are some tips for spotting and avoiding scams on Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle. But if you’re more of a motivated-by-fear person, read this story about a guy who wanted a deal on a swimming pool and got “a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps” instead. Still, fintech companies offer the unbanked the ability to save money and build credit. For someone who can’t open a traditional bank account, Venmo can be a lifeline, since they can add funds to their Venmo balance and then pay bills using their Venmo debit card without needing a traditional checking account. If they have access to a smartphone, getting basic banking services is simple these days. As I learned firsthand when testing out many of these services over the years, it’s very easy to sign up for and easy to deposit money into a fintech app. If you have a problem, however, help can be hard to find. Many fintech companies and neobanks, including Chime, lack brick-and-mortar locations, which means you can’t walk into a branch to get an issue resolved. In fact, poor customer service is a common complaint for these companies. That means you should always research a company before giving money to it. Read the reviews and study the fine print. Obvious red flags include hidden fee structures and reports of customers not being able to withdraw their money. You should also consider trying services out with small sums rather than your life savings. And, as always, watch out for scams and frauds. What is true in the real world is even more true in the app world: Beware of deals that look too good to be true. Only gamble with what you’d be willing to lose. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Kamala Harris’s new (old) problem at the border

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Installation of razor wire at the southern border between Texas and Mexico. | Christian Torres / Anadolu via Getty Images It’s been one of the most obvious changes since Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee: tougher talk on the border, an emphasis on enforcement and prosecuting traffickers, and renewed support for a bipartisan bill that would keep building the wall and hire more Border Patrol agents. Her convention speech and first debate performance backed that up. And for the most part, her party’s left flank fell in line — the imperative to beat Donald Trump was just too strong. But that balance is being tested. The vice president made her first visit to the southern border on Friday, heading to the small town of Douglas, Arizona. And some cracks are becoming more obvious among progressive activists, who worry that Harris is too comfortably embracing the hawkish bipartisan border bill and not doing enough for pro-immigrant policies. Progressives are caught between two maxims: They can’t give too much ground on their preferred policies, but they’re wary of hurting Harris’s campaign, in turn helping the anti-immigrant fanatic that is Donald Trump. That first priority was dominant once Harris was nominated. But now some activists worry that they’re giving up too much in the name of political expediency. There’s a “real tension that exists in our movement right now,” Vanessa Cárdenas, a longtime strategist and executive director of the pro-immigrant America’s Voice group, told me. “We are concerned about the emphasis on the border, but we also understand that [Kamala Harris] is our best conduit to move things ahead toward the goal that we all want.” So as Harris speaks about American “sovereignty,” hiring more border agents, and rolling out more fentanyl detection machines, old questions are resurfacing: Will she also embrace the growing calls for openness to immigration, for expanded asylum protections and legal pathways? And will she recommit to passing some immigration reform for those already living here? Her campaign, at least, says that she is: They point to comments supporting legal immigration, “protect[ing] our DREAMers,” and creating “pathways for people to earn citizenship” from this month. But advocates want to hear more. For a while, these pro-immigrant comments tended to come as an afterthought, after Harris made the forceful case for enforcement and blamed Trump for sabotaging the much-discussed Senate bill. Harris’s promise to revive and pass that legislation has long been worrisome to pro-immigrant organizations — so much so that 83 local, state, national, and international groups led by United We Dream and Amnesty International USA sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Harris earlier this month making clear that they would organize against the “harmful Senate border bill now and in the future.” “It is shameful that instead of investing in welcoming the most vulnerable people who seek safety and a better life, and who make our country better by every measure, we’d suggest wasting our resources in ineffectual, inefficient deterrence policies that harm and kill these same people,” the letter read. And still, less than a week later, United We Dream’s political and electoral arm officially endorsed Harris, saying they’d “do everything in our power to keep our people alive and safe so that we can organize for years to come.” “We will continue to push for immigration policies that center the lives and well-being of all immigrants,” Bruna Sollod, the senior political director of United We Dream Action, said in that endorsement. “We choose Harris as our next organizing target and are ready to hold her accountable these next four years.” At the same, some groups are hoping that Harris’s more hardline stance is temporary — rhetoric needed in changing times — and that she’ll end up being more liberal as president. “We all know and trust Harris to make the right decisions when she’s in office,” Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the liberal Immigration Hub group, told Axios earlier this month. They’re also skeptical that the border bill Harris is touting will ever, in current form, become law: “I don’t think this bill will ever come up again, as-is,” Talbot said. Some progressives on the Hill feel the same way. “When we are in the majority in the House, and hopefully keep the Senate, and keep the White House, we can scratch that Senate bill and actually create a Democratic bill that addresses the root causes at the border and that really focuses on humanitarian relief and actual solutions,” Illinois Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez told me. “But we will be in a different circumstance come from January.” For now, the truce still seems to be holding — at least mostly. Criticism remains measured. Advocates acknowledge that a visit to the border will likely focus on just that. But they hope she speaks more specifically moving forward. “We want to see a presidency that makes clear that we need to build from day one, through congressional and administrative and executive power, a modern, secure, and orderly and fair immigration system so people actually have lawful pathways. That will reduce unauthorized migration, because that is what the evidence shows will actually work,” said Todd Schulte, the president of the criminal and immigrant justice group FWD.us. And advocates acknowledge that shifting public opinion has become more hostile and suspicious of immigrants in the post-Trump era. On Friday, the Pew Research Center released its most recent survey on American voters’ views on immigration and immigration policy. It isn’t a surprise that the vast majority of Trump supporters back Trump’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants — but it is notable that nearly a third of Harris supporters would. Vast majorities of both Trump (96 percent) and Harris supporters (80 percent) also support better border enforcement. And perhaps more significantly for immigration activists: The share of voters who say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally if “certain requirements are met,” has fallen nearly 20 points, from 77 percent in 2017 to 59 percent this year. Public sentiment may still change — and public polling shows that some share of the electorate trusts her more than they trusted Biden on immigration. The truce may yet hold, but it’s clear that, if Harris wins the White House, there’ll be no easy answer — policy-wise or politically — on immigration.

Weather radar showed a strange blue mass in the eye of Hurricane Helene. What was it?

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Dark clouds from then-tropical storm Helene over Havana, Cuba, on September 25. | Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images Birds are incredible navigators, capable of traveling thousands of miles each year to the same location. But sometimes even they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time — like inside a hurricane. Last night, as Hurricane Helene was making landfall in Florida as a powerful Category 4 storm, radar spotted a mass in the eye of the storm that experts say is likely birds and perhaps also insects. See this blue blob on radar. These are birds stuck in the eye of Hurricane Helene! pic.twitter.com/traq2BQqWD— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) September 27, 2024 Helene was a massive storm when it traveled across the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week. Seabirds likely fled the storm’s extreme winds — which reached 140 miles per hour — and ended up in the eye, where it’s calm. Once inside, they essentially got trapped, unable to pierce through the fierce gusts of the eye wall. When the storm dies down, the mass of birds will probably dissipate, Kyle Horton, a researcher at Colorado State University who studies bird migration, told Vox. Storms like Helene can blow seabirds like petrels, jaegers, and frigatebirds far inland. Exhausted, they end up in unfamiliar habitats far away from home where they can’t easily find food. “It’s a challenging situation,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We know that birds do die in these things.” Indeed, frigate birds — large seabirds with angular wings and a forked tail — were spotted by birders in central Georgia and even Tennessee this Friday as the storm churned inland. Though remarkable, it’s not uncommon for birds and insects to get trapped inside the eye of tropical cyclones, according to research by Matthew Van Den Broeke, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Reports dating back to the 19th century — many of which come from ships — have documented this phenomenon, noting in some cases that the air was “filled with thousands of birds and insects.” One report documented an owl inside the storm. In a 2021 study, Van Den Broeke analyzed radar from 33 Atlantic hurricanes that hit the US mainland or Puerto Rico between 2011 and 2020. Each one showed signs of birds and insects inside the eye of the storm. Hurricanes like Helene can also substantially impact fall migration, when several billion birds migrate south ahead of winter. A map of migration from Thursday night, when Helene made landfall, shows that millions of birds were migrating west of the storm in places like Texas and Louisiana, but few if any were moving through Florida. When skies clear after a storm, however, birds resume their migration en masse, Farnsworth said. “After the storm passes, we see these big explosions of birds at night,” he told me. It’s also worth remembering that birds have evolved with these storms for millennia. They can likely detect a coming hurricane by sensing things like changes in atmospheric pressure and they know how to hunker down when storms arrive, such as by orienting their aerodynamic bodies toward the wind. “They’ve adapted to this, they’ve evolved with it,” Farnsworth said. “Yes, storms are getting more extreme. But birds know how to deal with these things.”